So here I am--summer before my Junior year of college, and spending my first summer away from New Jersey. This blog will chronicle my summer as well as my new project: The Recycle, Reuse, Redesign Project where I try to redesign the old until it looks new!

Monday, June 7, 2010

The Recycle, Reuse, Redesign Project: Paper Baskets

Sometimes, when I make crafts, I wing things and then I rush things and then they look sort of shitty. This is what happened last night. I wanted to use an old issue of Cosmo to make a container to hold some of my beauty products that I just leave sprawled out on my dresser. I used a paper weaving technique that I found a version of on Ravelry.com. The author of My Recycled Bags Blog suggested that I check out Ravelry's from Trash to Treasures group for project ideas.

Poster Emily Blades posted a picture of something her daughter made on the forum there. Her d

aughter's basket is to the left. her daughter's basket is a lot better than mine, and also more basket-like.

Mine is sort of just a cylinder to hold my stuff. What I did was cut a magazine page in half, then fold one half into four sections to create a piece to use as a weave:

Now here's where I messed up. I didn't have any glue in my apartment, so I used staples, which makes things look shitty. Use glue. Please. So, glue (or staple if you must) two pieces together, these are going to create your horizontal pieces. Single pieces are for vertical pieces. Your first horizontal piece should be a circle. Start gluing the single/vertical pieces to the base circle, one in front of the circle one behind. Once you've gone all the way around, start weaving the horizontal pieces through, and attaching them with glue to create more circles.

It will probably look like a strange hat at some point:

Finish weaving until you get to a height you want, and cut off the excess. It will look something like this:

This is why you shouldn't staple:

You can see the staples, and they look unattractive. I rushed through the directions there, so if anyone needs a more detailed explanation, let me know.